【英文】剑桥大学报告：大国碰撞：“中美国”到新冷战（92页）

英文研究报告 2023年02月03日 06:21 管理员

The lawsuits by AMSC and Veeco are by no means isolated cases. Figure 7 shows that the aggregate number of lawsuits fifiled by US companies against Chinese entities related to intellectual property right in US courts rose steadily in the early 2000s, then jumped after 2009 in the aftermath of the global fifinancial crisis and subsequent Chinese stimulus. The majority of these cases follows a typical pattern. They involve US companies, with or without businesses in China, whose employees are bribed or manipulated to appropriate essential trade secrets and hand them over to Chinese competitors, who then sell similar products at much lower prices and take the original company’s market share in China and elsewhere in the world. The relation between the employee who appropriates the trade secret and the Chinese competitor that obtains the technology varies from case to case.

Not all victims of intellectual property appropriation choose legal action. There are cases in which US companies, aware of the size of the Chinese market and thus wanting to avoid animosity with the Chinese authorities, choose to adapt rather than fifight the infringement of their intellectual property rights. For example, Vermeer, a manufacturer of heavy agricultural and industrial equipment, has been exporting motorized drilling machines and other heavy machinery to China since the 1990s. In the 2000s, it found that XCMG, a local state company in Xuzhou, was selling copycat machines at much lower prices. Vermeer did not take any action but learned to innovate fast enough to stay ahead of the Chinese copycat. It also adapted by no longer selling the most advanced machine in the Chinese market. Instead, it sold more simplifified, lower-cost versions of its machines in China. XCMG, as well as other heavy machinery manufacturers in China such as Sany and Zoomlion, has reportedly been thriving on selling products that are strikingly similar to designs by Vermeer and other leading construction and mining machine makers, like Caterpillar and Liebherr (Hook 2013; Mining 2020). Many of these manufacturers have not taken legal action, seemingly for the sake of the continuous goodwill they rely on in China.